Thoughts on editing for print and digital media

punctuation

First Amendment Day is Tuesday, Sept. 23, at UNC-Chapel Hill. Events will include a reading of banned books, a discussion of access to public records and a trivia contest. If you can’t be there, you can follow the fun on Twitter via the hashtag #UNCfree.

National Punctuation Day is Wednesday, Sept. 24, throughout the United States. I’ll mark the moment with periods, commas and (yes) semicolons.

I hope that you will join me in celebrating our freedoms and our language.

A recent Q&A on cover letters stayed near the top of the “most popular” list at the New York Times site for nearly a week. It’s certainly a timely article, with many people (including journalists) on the job market. And yes, those letters still matter in the age of the e-mailed résumé.

The last question in the Q&A is an important one. It’s about common mistakes in cover letters. Here’s part of the answer:

A cover letter with typos, misspellings and poor sentence structure may take you out of the running for a job. If you cannot afford to pay someone to review your cover letter and résumé, enlist a friend or a family member with good language skills to do it instead.

It’s true. Those things can take you out of the running for a job. I’ve seen that happen in newsrooms and in academia. If you are on the job market or want to go to graduate school, make sure those letters are clear and clean.